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Transcript of Gentle Johnny Ramensky by Robert Jeffrey
GENTLE JOHNNY
RAMENSKY
Also by Robert Jeffrey
The Barlinnie Story
A Boxing Dynasty (with Tommy Gilmour)
Real Hard Cases (with Les Brown)
Crimes Past
Glasgow Crimefighter (with Les Brown)
Glasgow’s Godfather
Gangs of Glasgow (first published as Gangland Glasgow)
Glasgow’s Hard Men
Blood on the Streets
The Wee Book of Glasgow
The Wee Book of the Clyde
*
With Ian Watson
Clydeside People and Places
The Herald Book of the Clyde
Doon the Watter
Images of Glasgow
Scotland’s Sporting Heroes
GENTLE JOHNNY
RAMENSKY
THE EXTRAORDINARY TRUE STORY OF
THE SAFE BLOWER WHO BECAME A WAR HERO
ROBERT JEFFREY
BLACK & WHITE PUBLISHING
First published 2010This edition first published 2011by Black & White Publishing Ltd
29 Ocean Drive, Edinburgh EH6 6JL
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 11 12 13 14
ISBN: 978 1 84502 346 1
Copyright # Robert Jeffrey 2010, 2011
The right of Robert Jeffrey to be identified as the authorof this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,without permission in writing from the publisher.
The publisher has made every reasonable effortto contact copyright holders of all material contained in this book.
Any omissions or errors are inadvertent and anyone who, for any reason,has not been contacted is invited to write to the publisher
so that a suitable acknowledgement can be madein subsequent editions of this work.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Typeset by Iolaire Typesetting, NewtonmorePrinted and bound by CPI Cox & Wyman, Reading
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii
1. THE HARD LIFE 1
2. FIRST STEPS ALONG THE CROOKED PATH 19
3. JAILBIRD JOHNNY 24
4. HUNTED DOWN 35
5. A JAILHOUSE LAWYER 44
6. TO SERVE KING AND COUNTRY 54
7. THE GREEN BERET 62
8. TOO LATE TO GO STRAIGHT 93
9. ON THE RUN AGAIN 100
10. A GIRL CALLED LILY 106
1 1. RECORD-BREAKING JAILBREAKER 113
12. A BAR-L BREAK-IN FOR A CHANGE . . . 119
13. ROUGH JUSTICE 128
14. THE CURIOUS CARFIN INCIDENT IN THE NIGHT 151
15. CIVVY STREET 156
16. AMONG FRIENDS 165
17. A BOOK BURNING 173
18. LOVE LETTERS 181
19. HEADING FOR A FALL 185
20. GAME OVER 190
APPENDIX 205
INDEX 209
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A large number of people gave assistance in the production of
this book. In particular I would like to acknowledge the help of
the following people and organisations: The staff of the Glasgow
Room in the Mitchell Library, the staff of the National Archives,
Charlotte Square, Edinburgh, James Anderson, Johnnie Beattie,
Les Brown, Dr Kathy Charles, Mrs E. Cook, Aileen Donald, Joe
Dunion, Haig Ferguson, Kendal Ferguson, Charles Gordon,
Mary Gordon, Harvey Grainger, John Hamilton, Elsie Ironside,
Jim Ironside, Stuart Irvine, Peter Jappy, Dr Grant Jeffrey, Ed
Johnston, William Johnston, Tommy Laing, Willie ‘Sonny’
Leitch, David Lovie, Dick Lynch, John Mathers, Jim McBeth
Daily Mail, William McIntyre, Dorothy McNab, Mr X, Walter
Norval, Liz Park, Peterman, Tam Purvey, John Quinn, Ronald
Ross, Ed Russell, Tony Russell, Patrick Smith, Bob Smyth Sunday
Post, Catherine Stevenson, Dorothy Thomson, Bert Watt, G. J.
Wilson.
‘Each man has an ambition and I have fulfilled mine long
ago. I cherish my career as a safe blower. In childhood days
my feet were planted on the crooked path and took firm
root. To each one of us is allotted a niche and I have found
mine. Strangely enough I am happy. For me the die is cast
and there is no turning back.’
John Ramensky, Barlinnie Prison, 1951
1
THE HARD LIFE
It was a hard childhood in a hard village – Glenboig in North
Lanarkshire. And later in one of the toughest areas of a hard city
– Glasgow’s Gorbals. The saga of the life of the man who became
famous as Gentle Johnny Ramensky began in the Lanarkshire of
coal pits, clay mines, steelworks and brickworks in 1905, a time
of conflict between immigrants from eastern Europe and native
Scots, and ended two World Wars later in 1972. Between those
dates, Johnny Ramensky led a life with the sort of highs and
lows that are normally reserved for the movies.
Johnny Ramensky was undoubtedly a complex man. Part of
him wanted a settled life, part of him wanted adventure, and he
wrestled with these conflicting desires throughout his life. He
was also well liked, as much by those in authority as those of the
criminal classes. His chosen profession was safe blower and he
was by far the most respected in his trade and the first name to
be contacted if a criminal plan was being hatched that involved
blowing open a safe. But his peacetime and wartime exploits
also made him one of the most high-profile men in the land, a
folk hero to many and a thorn in the flesh of authority. Being
a criminal with a famous face plastered all over the newspapers
is, however, not the most sensible way to keep out of jail, as
Ramensky would find out. But it all contributed to the making of
the man himself.
Despite its problems, there is no doubt that Johnny Ramensky
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gentle johnny ramensky
relished his fame. After all, he was from a poor eastern European
immigrant family, he had endured extreme poverty and he had
made a name for himself against all the odds, even if it was a
name not everyone would have wanted. He would have to
endure years of incarceration for his crimes but, between these
long stretches of time, were briefer interludes of adventure and
excitement which really made him a household name. As well as
becoming an astonishingly prolific jailbreaker whose latest ex-
ploits were avidly followed by the media, wartime service in the
Commandos would set him apart from others and write his name
into history as a legend, albeit a complex and highly flawed one.
The story of Johnny Ramensky begins with his early years in
Glenboig, a time that shaped the boy and sowed the seeds of the
man. He was born into poverty and deprivation and would later
succumb to the easy money temptations of a criminal life –
partially perhaps to ease his family’s grinding poverty in the
infamous Gorbals in the early years of the twentieth century.
But he was also motivated by a deep and constant thirst for
adventure. In his youth, he had a chip on his shoulder about his
antecedents and suffered racial taunts in an era less politically
correct than today. His family roots were in far-off eastern
Europe and he was frequently teased and taunted as a ‘Pole’
though he was Lithuanian and a ‘foreigner’.
During his life, Ramensky would acquire something of a
Robin Hood tag which was frequently used by some of the
more lurid tabloids but was perhaps not completely accurate.
In the Glasgow of his time ‘robbing hoods’ were more of a
speciality. But without a doubt he had some passing similarities
to Robin of Sherwood. Johnny operated in the days when even
among the toughest of the Glasgow slums there was something
of a criminal code. Old ladies did not get bashed on the head for
the meagre bags of shopping they were carting home from the
local Co-op. Preferred targets for burglars and thieves were
often businesses insured against loss, rather than private homes.
And if a private home was the target it was more likely to belong
2
the hard life
to a businessman living in opulence in the suburbs than a
struggling shipyard worker from a tenement close. He was,
perhaps, a criminal of the old school.
Mind you, concentrating on ‘tanning’ businesses rather than
homes is not completely daft. Many a villain would tell you that it
is a sound notion to steal from the well insured – often you could
go back and rob the same place again when it had reopened, by
then tarted up and restocked with the aid of insurance money!
As well as the Robin Hood label there is a more exotic and
slightly more realistic comparison in the Ramensky story –
with that of the French felon Henri Charriere, played by Steve
McQueen in the Hollywood film of his memoir Papillon. Glasgow
historian and novelist John Burrowes included a chapter on
Gentle Johnny in his Great Glasgow Stories (Mainstream, 2000)
and headlined it ‘The Peterhead Papillon’. Burrowes pointed out
that Charriere, from the south of France, whose most sensational
escape was from Ile du Diable, the notorious penal colony off the
coast of South America, was born within months of Johnny in
the early years of the twentieth century. They both died aged
sixty-seven, within months of each other. Each man made five
jailbreaks and both constantly tried to record their adventures
in prison notebooks. Charriere had more success with his
scribblings than Johnny, however.
Papillon first saw the light of day in the pleasant sunshine of
the Ardeche. Johnny was born in the less glamorous and less
temperate surroundings of Glenboig. But in 1905 the Lanark-
shire village at least had a commercial buzz and there was
money-making going on in the place. Today it wears a resigned
air of desolation, a village whose prosperity is visibly long gone.
The air seems tainted with a whiff of better times past. Basically
the village is now a crossroads, a pub and a post office and not
too much else, though there is some little sign of life returning to
the area with modern villas being built around the Farm Road
area, in behind the pub, which is known as ‘The Big Shop’. The
reason behind the odd name for these licensed premises is
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gentle johnny ramensky
simple and logical. As you might expect of such an area, there
was in its heyday more than one pub. The smaller Glenboig pub,
now closed, was known, with admirable Scottish working-class
humour, as ‘The Wee Shop’. Even the pub names tell a story.
Glenboig is not the sort of place you expect to find a ‘Fox
and Hounds’, a ‘Dog and Duck’ or an ‘Anglers’ Rest’. Here
Formica trumps wood panelling. Work, or perhaps in these
difficult days in the twenty-first century ‘no work’, is the key. In
the early days of Glenboig there was plenty of work. Hard work.
Recreation then meant trying to beat the bookie or maybe
making a name for oneself as a superstar of pitch and toss.
At least you can still do that in the grim backlands of industrial
Lanarkshire. And Glenboig has a claim to a place of honour in
Scottish history as the birthplace of that extraordinary man
Johnny Ramensky.
Work was plentiful in those days, but it was both hard and
dangerous: mining clay and coal and making the quality bricks
that were famous round the world. Fire clay brick manufacture
began in Glenboig in the 1830s, largely as a result of the skills of
the son of a Renfrewshire bleacher called James Dunnachie, who
became the co-owner of the brickworks and was also involved
in the mine. The bricks produced in this area by the Glenboig
Union Fireclay Company and its successor, the Star Works, were
soon judged ‘to be superior to all others produced in Britain
including the highly regarded Stourbridge and Newcastle
bricks’. The quality was so high that orders were received from
Russia, Canada, India and Australia and most European coun-
tries. Medals were won at building exhibitions in many parts of
the world. These gold-ribbon bricks can still occasionally be
spotted by the sharp-eyed in some of the now time-worn walls
in the area. Often the bricks were emblazoned with large letters
reading ‘Glenboig’ above a star, but even without a logo an
expert can still identify them. Their fame was such that the
makers of lesser-quality bricks used the local Post Office as a
holding address in order that their letters carried the postmark
4
the hard life
‘Glenboig’ and that allowed them to ride a little on the back of
the success of the true Glenboig brick.
This was the birthplace of Yonus Ramanauckas, the man
who was to become Johnny Ramensky, a.k.a. John Ramsay or
Ramsey. This is where he spent his early years before travelling
to the slums of the Gorbals with his family. This was the place
that helped mould Johnny into the remarkable man he became.
I ventured into ‘The Big Shop’ one bitter snowy February
afternoon, hoping to chat with any drinkers who had sought
some warmth and refreshment in the bar. Surprisingly, and
sadly, any youngsters around had barely heard of Johnny
Ramensky, the village’s most famous son. However, over a
coffee, a local retired brick-worker called Joe Dunion, a small
white-haired man, still fast on his feet, was able to tell me of
seeing Johnny. This sighting had taken place in the very pub in
which we were standing. On one of his brief respites from jail
after the Second World War, Johnny had returned to Glenboig
for a chat with friends from there or nearby Craigneuk, where
many of the Lithuanian and Polish miners who came to Scotland
had settled. Johnny, said Joe, was respectably and smartly
dressed. In fact when you speak to relatives, fellow prisoners,
policemen or acquaintances about Johnny, the first words they
tend to use are ‘respectably dressed’ or ‘smartly turned out’. Out
of jail Johnny took great care over his appearance.
Joe Dunion remembers Johnny on his last visit to ‘The Big
Shop’ as a figure given a lot of respect by old neighbours and
fellow miners. To the drinkers at the bar that day, Johnny was an
important and admired figure, already a legend. He drank little,
but there was laughter in his company and many tales were
being told of adventures as a cat burglar creeping across
darkened city rooftops, or blowing safes behind the Nazi lines.
Everyone was pointing him out and Joe Dunion remembers him
looking ‘European’ amidst the Lanarkshire men.
Joe has a great interest in local history and he took me to the
place where 11 Ashbank – the house where Johnny was born – is
5
gentle johnny ramensky
thought to have stood. The actual houses, miners’ rows of the
type you can still find occasionally in desolate odd spots in rural
Lanarkshire, are no longer there. They have been replaced with
a few bungalows and beyond, over a field or two towards
Coatbridge, by a housing estate. Joe and I wandered a few
hundred yards back down the road, where we stopped and
looked over a farm gate and into a field beyond. This unremark-
able steel farm gate gave no sign to the passer-by that it once led
to the site of the famous mine where Johnny’s father, Wincas
Ramanauckas, had worked as a strike-breaking clay miner.
Wincas, who had married Johnny’s mother Mare (often known
as Marie in Scotland) in Virbalia Miestely, Lithuania, in Novem-
ber 1897, was one of hundreds imported from eastern Europe to
help drive the Lanarkshire men back to work during a stoppage.
The mine and factory owners in these rough days were indeed
a ruthless breed. Scabbing is the worst offence in the trade union
rulebook to this day and there is no doubt that there was
considerable antagonism at the time between the incomers
and the native Scots. Some of the hard feelings must have
percolated, perhaps subconsciously, into the psyche of the
young Ramanauckas, leaving scars of resentment that would
surface years later.
As time wore on, the Poles and Lithuanians who came to
Scotland to earn for their families were often spared the worst of
the working-class hatred against strike-breakers as all miners, in
their dangerous world, have a grudging respect for their fellows
who toil underground, wherever they come from. But at the
time there was much bad blood around. The Ramanauckas
family must have struggled with the antagonism as they fought
to make a new life and learn a new language, far from eastern
Europe.
The sheer numbers of immigrants ensured that assimilation
was a slow business. By 1914, it is estimated that 4,000 Lithua-
nians had settled in Lanarkshire. At that time, the distinction
between Lithuanians and Poles was ignored by the Scots, who
6
the hard life
tended to call all the immigrants ‘Poles’ – which is more than
a tad insensitive and a bit like referring to the Scots as English.
A small point, perhaps, but nonetheless strange in Scotland, a
country that takes so much pride in the difference between itself
and its neighbour to the south.
More significant – and indicative of the state of conflict
between the eastern Europeans and the Scots, whose jobs they
threatened – is the fact that Keir Hardie, founding father of the
Labour Party, helped lead a xenophobic campaign against
the immigrants. Another factor in a dangerous mix was that
the flood of incomers was largely composed of Jews and
Catholics who had a way of life that was alien to staunch
Scottish Protestants. It is said that most of the Jews settled in
the Gorbals and most of the Catholics in Lanarkshire, where by
1905 there was already a Lithuanian priest in residence. Around
that time there was also a Lithuanian social club and, a little
later, even a newspaper – Iseiviu Draugas (the ‘immigrant’s
friend’).
Interestingly, at the time of maximum Polish immigration to
Scotland, under EU legislation in the late twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries, newsagents in some areas, even as far
away from the industrial central belt as rural Kintyre, sold
imported copies of Polish tabloids. But that was almost a
century on.
Keir Hardie was far from alone in his opposition to the
immigrants fleeing Europe for Scotland. John Wilson, Unionist
candidate for St Rollox in Glasgow at the general election of
1900, did not believe it proper for ‘this country to be the
dumping ground for the paupers of Europe’ and the trade
unions and trades councils were opposed to the immigrants.
It is interesting to speculate how much of this feeling of being an
unwanted outsider in an, at times, unwelcoming land played in
the forming of the Ramensky character. Maybe that was one
reason for his desire to be something of a loner in his later life of
crime, a man who was mostly a ‘freelance’ safecracker or a lone
7
gentle johnny ramensky
wolf rather than a criminal committed to one gang or one circle
of law-breakers.
The various transmutations of the name Ramanauckas to
Ramensky or Ramenski, or eventually Ramsay, are typical of
what happened to the flood of workers from eastern Europe
around the turn of the twentieth century. Immigration officials
and pit bosses, often confused by complicated names they
couldn’t pronounce, labelled the workers at random. Like it
or not, the new guys found themselves known as Willie Stewart
or Jimmy Smith. It is said that one miner who signed a pay form
with an X was thereafter Joseph Ecks.
Something similar seems to have happened to Johnny when
he first went to primary school in Glenboig. The assumption is
that the teachers found the proliferation of Lithuanian names
confusing so, arbitrarily, Ramanauckas became Ramensky. Why
the educational authorities did not simply rename him Ramsay
or something similar from the start is a mystery. It would have
saved Johnny much angst if they had done so. In his early years,
the foreign-sounding name brought much hassle to a man who
had breathed his first in Lanarkshire and who went on to fight
bravely for the country where he was born. And to feel fiercely
that he was a Scot.
After the initial aggressive backlash, the Lithuanians and
others from eastern Europe gradually began to be accepted.
The process gathered pace when the real reason why the new-
comers were here was more widely known and understood –
some were escaping conscription in the Russian army, others
were Jews fleeing persecution, even more were ordinary decent
folk simply desperate to get out of poverty and ready to go
anywhere for a better life. John Burrowes, author of several
excellent Glasgow histories, remarks that at the time when
Wincas Ramanauckas fled Lithuania, the place was like Kosovo
in the 1990s. (Incidentally, another Glasgow writer, Colin
McFarlane, brackets Johnny in the fame game with fellow
Gorbals man Alan Pinkerton, who was on the other side of
8
the hard life
the law.) His detective agency brought him into contact with
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and the Jesse James gang.
You can take the man out of the Gorbals . . .
Eventually the Scots’ passion for fair play for the down-
trodden began to kick in and over the years the newcomers
from mainland Europe became accepted. Another factor in the
process of assimilation was schooling. Johnny and his class-
mates must have learned a lot on both sides as the cultures
merged.
Some of this was going through my mind as Joe Dunion and I
leaned on that unremarkable iron gate and tried to imagine
what the entrance to the mine had looked like in its heyday. On
that oppressively dull, cold day, the shadows of the men who
had trudged, a hundred years or so ago, down the sloping
incline to the face where the clay was mined seemed to close in
on us. This was not a pit, Joe explained; the difference being that
you walk into a mine and travel down a shaft to a pit.
A few hundred yards from the old entrance to the mine, there
is a pleasant little woodland walk meandering round a small
lake. Even on that raw, snow-swept February day, mums with
prams and kids, well wrapped up in scarves and knitted
bonnets, took an afternoon constitutional round this reclaimed
industrial land. Did any of them give a thought to the men who
had laboured in daily danger, shovelling heavy spadefuls of
clay, deep underground beneath the flower-edged paths of
today to provide the raw material to make the famous Glenboig
bricks? Somehow I doubt it.
It is not rocket science to work out why the site for the
Glenboig clay mine was chosen. A thick, creamy sludge of
greyish clay stuck to our shoes and ran in ugly little rivulets
down the gutters of the steep street leading towards the centre of
the village. And if you asked any gardeners among the nearby
householders you got quick confirmation that this was the place
to be if you were after top-quality clay rather than an earthy
loam suitable for good gardening. Peat must sell well in garden
9
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centres near Glenboig. The attraction of the area’s abundance of
top-quality clay was such that the famous brickworks were built
almost within yards of the clay mine entrance – raw material
and final production process, side by side.
You could imagine you felt an oppressive air of sadness in the
place. Perhaps it was because near here, where Joe and I stood,
one of the most tragic episodes in Lanarkshire history was acted
out. It happened on a calamitous day in August 1909. Johnny
would have been a child of four at the time, but the proximity of
his home to the mine and the dramatic scenes on his doorstep
lead you to suspect that he would have been aware of the
horror. Certainly his parents would have witnessed it, even if he
himself was too young to see or appreciate the full appalling
result of the tragedy. Wincas was employed in the mine.
Although he escaped the disaster, one of the victims was Joseph
Anderson, who lived in Ashbank, just a few doors away from
the Ramanauckas family. They must have known the man well.
The accident in the Glenboig Union Fireclay Company mine
caused four deaths. A group of six miners had placed a shot (an
explosive charge) at the face and retreated. The shot was fired
normally and they made their way back into the working area.
Then, without warning, a portion of the roof thought to weigh
twenty tons fell on them. Luckily the debris missed two of the
miners, but the other four were trapped under the clay and died
a horrible death. It took an hour to reach them and bring the first
body out.
Then followed a truly horrific scene. News of the fall had
spread throughout the village and within minutes of it happen-
ing a large crowd, mainly women, had gathered at the mine
entrance. As the bodies were carried out of the deep darkness
of the mine into the August light, friends and relatives of the
deceased cried out as the victims were laid on the bare earth.
One little boy, recognising a body, cried out, ‘Oh, that’s ma
faither!’ and fled the scene in tears. Many of the women were in
hysterics. James Donnachie, co-owner of the brickworks, who
10
the hard life
had been in Glasgow that afternoon, came immediately to the
scene by car – an indication of his wealth. He expressed to the
press his sadness and his concern that he could not understand
the cause of the accident.
The shot fired was of the usual kind and the men had taken
the normal precaution of examining the roof before re-entering
the area. It was the only case of such a fatal accident to occur in
that mine. Not for the first time, a mining village had suffered a
grievous blow. It was a regular story – too regular – in mining
communities the length and breadth of Britain in the days when
health and safety at work was a distant dream. The lure of big
money made many a mine or mill-owner take shortcuts, risking
the lives of their employees. This time, tragedy had happened on
the Ramensky doorstep and the family grieved, along with all
those living in Glenboig at the time – especially those with
family members who earned their living underground. They
also learned all the better the dangers of working with ex-
plosives. Johnny faced those dangers all his life – as a miner,
as a safe blower, as a Commando saboteur.
But there were a few happier memories for Johnny before
1913, when his father died and the family moved from Glenboig
to a tough life in the Gorbals. Catherine Stevenson is a sprightly,
outgoing and friendly pensioner, a retired social worker. She has
a lively twinkle in her eye, and a good memory of what it was
like for Lithuanians like the Ramanauckas family in the early
years of the century in Lanarkshire. Now in her eighties,
Catherine was born as Katarina Builbidus to Lithuanian parents
living in Hamilton.
She got to know young Johnny well through family connec-
tions. Her father Yuzef was a baker who had turned to mining
and had taken a tortuous route out of Lithuania through
Romania and Germany to Scotland. It was a hard, sometimes
dangerous, journey made by thousands. It is said that when they
arrived in Leith, after a rough North Sea crossing, some of the
immigrants thought they had arrived in America! Yuzef ended
11
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up making his way as a miner in Lanarkshire and it was not long
before he sent home for a bride. Catherine’s mother travelled to
join him aged only twenty. Catherine says that now we would
call it an arranged marriage. In those days it was not all that
unusual. Yuzef was soon fluent in English, but Catherine’s
mother, who lived for fifty-five years in Lanarkshire, never
spoke English. Again, this was quite common. Johnny’s parents
were also far from perfect English speakers though he himself
became well spoken and articulate and learned to write English
to good effect.
Catherine says the women in the Lithuanian communities in
those days were so immersed in their own family lives, and the
lives of their immigrant friends, that it was simply not necessary
to speak fluent English – though they soon acquired the ability
to get by with shopping and other everyday tasks. She paints a
vivid picture of what was a distinctive and often, despite the
difficulties of the times, a happy way of life. A new life in
Lanarkshire with at least some money coming in and no threat
from invading militias or secret police was much more desirable
than an uncomfortable existence in the old homeland. Like all
newcomers, the Lithuanians tended to stay together in what
would now perhaps be called ghettoes, but that seems
altogether too harsh a word for life in the Scottish mining
communities. The men worked hard underground or in steel-
works. The women worked hard at home.
Catherine told me: ‘The house was well kept. You would not
usually find a Lithuanian whose house was dirty. It would not
be palatial but it would be clean. Lithuanians were always quite
well dressed – not that we had the money, but we had the ability
– mothers would make the children’s clothes, for example.’
But there was time for play, too, at regular gatherings in halls
in Craigneuk, in Bellshill and sometimes in Glasgow itself. There
was a pattern to such regular social evenings. Catherine recalls:
‘It was a meeting of people of similar backgrounds getting
together. They would put food on the table, black bread – sweet
12
the hard life
and sour we call it now – and cold meats, tea and coffee. There
would be a musician there with an accordion, who would play
away in the background. The children would play among
themselves, often crawling under the tables, and the adults
sat and talked or danced to the tunes of the old country.’
The young Ramensky, his brothers and his sisters Agnes
and Margaret would be at home on such evenings when the
Lithuanians celebrated their independence and their identity,
distinct from their Scots neighbours and fellow toilers in pit and
factory. But for most of the time there was a striving by the
Lithuanians to fit into their new homeland. Catherine says: ‘We
were always taught, because we were Lithuanian, people hadn’t
to see us as different. But we were always regarded – and don’t
think I am being facetious here – as cleaner than the other kids.
Your mother made your clothes, a skirt and a top, and your hair
was always in plaits and very often crossed over the top of your
head. We did not have very much money, but one thing I will
say about most Lithuanian women: they were very good house-
wives; they could turn their hand to anything. I always tell my
daughter, Katarina Adele, that when you went to a Lithuanian
Mass all the people were smart and scrubbed clean and nobody
was scruffy.’
Johnny had an aunt in Craigneuk who had dropped her
Lithuanian name and settled for being known as Mrs Andrews.
In those far-off days, holidays of any kind were a novelty, but on
the basis that a change is as good as a rest, young children were
often shuttled around family members. So it was that young
Catherine used to travel the few miles from Hamilton to
Craigneuk for a wee holiday with Mrs Andrews. Catherine
says: ‘Mrs Andrews had a daughter called Sylvia and she
was the same age as me. She is still living in America.’
She also has vivid memories of the Ramanauckas family. ‘I
can remember Johnny’s mother clear as yesterday. She was quite
a wee, well-rounded, plump lady, who had only one arm. I
didn’t know how she had lost the other.’ This was a disability
13
gentle johnny ramensky
that made housekeeping, dressmaking and similar tasks diffi-
cult for Johnny’s mother. (The loss of the arm seems to have
happened in the classic sort of mill accident, when a machine
was thought to have stopped, but suddenly restarted and
caught the clothing of a worker. Wire safety cages and such
like were not in use at the time.) Catherine went on: ‘‘Though I
remember Mrs Ramanauckas well I never remember anything
of Johnny’s father. His mother was always pleasant to me as a
wee girl. John used to come occasionally. He was a very
handsome youth. Very blond, quiet – he wasn’t a rowdy young
man. But of course he was a good bit older than Sylvia and
myself.’
Johnny’s father seems to have been a shadowy figure – or
maybe he was just too often away at work down the pit. There
are also suggestions that at times he was overfond of a dram.
This was not a trait passed on to his son who, although he liked
the company of the pub and club, never drank to excess and
kept himself fit well into his fifties. Catherine Stevenson says
that Johnny’s mother seems to have been by far the strongest
influence – and the fact that she was disabled strengthened the
bond between Johnny and her and increased his feeling of
responsibility for her. She says: ‘Do you know what I think –
there was never any question of his father. There were always a
lot of men at the Lithuanian evening gatherings, but there was
never a man there belonging to Johnny or his mother. I think
that probably because her arm was completely away Johnny
had responsibility for his mother.’ Catherine accepts the theory
that this urge to care for his mother may have been a factor in
his early thieving, which began after the family moved from
Glenboig to the Gorbals.
Johnny’s father did play an important role in one aspect of his
life – explosives. Wincas Ramanauckas had plenty of experience
in the use of explosives to blow open seams of coal or clay. He
had started in Lithuania with the dangerous ‘black powder’,
which was used by shot-firers in mines and which, before the
14
the hard life
invention of the detonator cap and modern explosives, was
extremely dangerous. But by the turn of the twentieth century,
quarries, mines and safe blowers alike moved to using the
various versions of explosives that were coming on the market
after Alfred Nobel had concocted dynamite – gelignite being a
modification of gelatine-dynamite containing a high percentage
of nitroglycerine. As a youngster, Johnny must have learned
from his father a respect for explosives, a respect he always
showed both working underground and in safe blowing.
Johnny’s mastery of the black art of cracking a safe was such
that, in later years, detectives arriving at the scene of a bank
robbery would look at the safe and the general state of the
premises, shrug their shoulders and remark, ‘Johnny again’. His
trademark was a neat job, using just enough ‘gelly’ to do the
business, without blowing the whole place apart. In later life he
became an expert in the different types of ‘gelly’, which could be
rigged to direct an explosion upwards, downwards or sideways.
He also was expert in the use of oxyacetylene equipment when
necessary in opening a ‘can’ in search of cash.
The late Paddy Meehan, wrongly convicted of the murder of
an Ayr pensioner in 1968, did a few safe jobs with Johnny and
once remarked he was the sort of safe blower who wanted to
tidy up afterwards. Not a normal trait found in Glasgow’s
petermen. Mind you, Johnny did make the odd mistake and
Meehan got some laughs in the pub with his tale of going to
open a safe in the company of the master cracksman and their
shock when the target turned out to be nothing more exciting
than a fridge.
Catherine Stevenson’s memories of Mare Ramanauckas were
a journey into the deep past of Johnny’s family history. However
she has some more modern memories of the master cracksman.
After the Second World War, she met him by accident on a visit
to the Barras, the world famous street market in the East End of
Glasgow. They immediately fell into conversation about the old
days and he mentioned how he missed the Lithuanian food of
15
gentle johnny ramensky
his youth. Catherine invited him home for the first of several
visits to her Hamilton bungalow to share a bit of a feast with her
and her husband. Johnny took along his second wife Lily – they
were then known by then as Mr and Mrs Ramsay and living in
the Gorbals.
For a Glenboig boy, the meal must have brought back
emotional childhood memories. The menu was a million miles
from the prison fare, or the army rations, that had sustained him
for most of his years. The meal started with a traditional raw fish
dish of which Catherine says the Scottish equivalent would be
soused herring. Beetroot soup, too, was a favourite and there
were plenty of spicy sausages and the cabbage so beloved of
eastern Europeans. Cold ham was also on the menu. What Lily,
a more conventional Glaswegian, thought of the food is not
recorded.
The chat and patter flowed back and forwards between the
old days in Glenboig and around Johnny’s many subsequent
adventures in the Commandos in the Second World War.
Catherine’s husband enjoyed these suburban evenings, too.
The Stevensons had met when they both worked in the Philips
factory in Hamilton, before she went into social work, and her
husband had ‘a great regard’ for Lithuanians. Assimilation had
largely been accomplished in the area. He was ‘kindness itself’,
as the Scots say, to Catherine’s mum, and the fact that his
mother-in-law didn’t speak English at all well did not seem a
barrier to their friendship. He managed a word or two in her
native tongue and was good about taking her to Lithuanian
social evenings or to Lithuanian Mass, where he blended in well
with the immigrant community.
Mr Stevenson and Johnny got on particularly well. Catherine
remembers the safe blower telling her husband he ‘had had
enough of prison life and was going to change’. (Not long after
this conversation he was back on the wrong side of the law. It
was a familiar story!) But the Stevensons and the Ramsays had
hours of entertaining conversation.
16
the hard life
Catherine says: ‘In our house Johnny was happy to talk to my
husband. They would sit there and chat for ages. My husband
was a clever businessman, but he enjoyed Johnny, who wasn’t
boastful – he was a quiet, inoffensive type of man.’ Johnny’s first
wife Daisy McManus had died in the early 1930s and was never
mentioned on these nights. But Catherine was not too sure that
Johnny and Lily were perfectly matched. Maybe Johnny’s
notoriety was part of the attraction for Lily, but Catherine found
her unremarkable and she did not fit into the Lithuanian loop –
they came from different worlds. She had a higher opinion of
Johnny: ‘Though you knew what he had been, he was still quite
a refined person.’ She also comments that on his visits out to
Hamilton he was always immaculately turned out.
Catherine Stevenson also says Johnny carried himself with the
distinctive demeanour of many Lithuanian men who, in her
view, had ‘charm, but not commitment’. She remembers a time
when she was walking her dog in the Cathkin Braes, a beauty
spot in the Southside of Glasgow. Seeing a man in the distance,
she said to a friend walking with her: ‘There’s a Lithuanian
man.’ She sensed a certain something about his style of dress, the
way he carried himself. And she was right. Many who knew
Johnny commented that, although he was always open and
friendly, there was a certain air of the man apart about him, a
certain difference. Maybe it was that lack of ‘commitment’ that
Catherine had commented on. These days we might say that his
Lithuanian genes sometimes shone through all his life.
Johnny was just eight when his father died in 1913, and this
was significant in shaping the man he became. He had two
brothers, but one died young and the other eventually settled in
Canada. From then on, Johnny felt he had a lifelong responsi-
bility for his mother and his sisters Agnes and Margaret. It
seems that Wincas had never really got his health back after the
horrors of his early life in Lithuania and his condition was
exacerbated by the rigours of mining life in Lanarkshire which,
commonly, was tough and short.
17
gentle johnny ramensky
Soon afterwards, the family moved to Glasgow. The move to
the big city was an important event in Johnny’s life. There is no
doubt that the remarkable character of Gentle Johnny Ramensky
– and the shape of his life to come – was formed not only in his
early years in Glenboig, but in the hard times in the Gorbals a
decade or so into the twentieth century.
18
2
FIRST STEPS ALONG
THE CROOKED PATH
Life in the Glenboig of mines, brickworks, danger and poverty
did not have much going for it for an immigrant miner from
Lithuania. But at least a lively youngster born in Scotland could
play in the surrounding fields, hear the birdsong and watch
clouds and the sun cross the sky. These were invisible to the
men, literally beneath his feet, who dug out clay and coal in a
working life of permanent darkness. In the winter, a boy could
lark around in fresh clean snow, in summer roam pastures and
woods. It was no rural idyll, but it must have been more
desirable to a wee boy in short trousers than life up a stinking
tenement close in Glasgow’s most infamous slum area, a des-
perate place with a name infamous worldwide.
Down the years hard men and gangsters in their hundreds
have claimed that it was life in the slums that drove them to
crime, and according to their stories they were the victims. There
was undoubtedly some truth in this. By the time he was eleven,
Johnny was a street criminal having his collar felt by the sturdy
Glasgow cops. Many of these were big men who themselves
had grown up in the clear air of the spray-lashed Western
Isles, who ended their days patrolling the mean streets of
Scotland’s greatest city. In later years, Johnny was to write that
the Gorbals urchins of his youth and his life in the slums were to
blame for his life of crime. It was a bit of a facile analysis: it has
19
gentle johnny ramensky
to be acknowledged that the difficult surroundings of the old
Gorbals also produced their fair share of honest hard toilers –
and some bright youngsters who took to education well, made
their way up in the world, even to high-earning jobs in the
professions.
In those days, the police had no mobile phones or squad cars.
The beat cop was a sort of tough guy in a blue uniform who
often administered rough justice on his own. Husbands known
to have ‘duffed up’ their wives would sometimes get a ‘doing’
from the local cop to convince them that they should treat
women with respect. The local teenage criminals were more
likely to get a clip on the ear or a boot up the backside than an
appearance in juvenile court. In the case of young Johnny
Ramensky, the fact that he was in regular contact with the
law from his earliest days does not seem to have had much
of a deterrent effect. In the rough and tumble of life in the
Gorbals, the distinction between right and wrong was blurred,
for kids, for adults and for the young men who ran with the
infamous gangs of the period before the First World War.
Survival was all. But, above all, the thing that Johnny seemed
to have picked up during the daily struggle in the slums was a
thirst for excitement.
The blast of a beat cop’s whistle and the light thunder from the
sandshoe-clad feet of youngsters dodging up closes to avoid the
men they called the ‘bluebottles’ were all part of a game of real-
life cops and robbers. Little shame or conscience was involved:
that was the way it was on the streets. The taste for adventure
and the lust for an adrenalin surge never left Johnny. He simply
could not settle to a regular job. Even when his likeable person-
ality led policemen or friends to offer him a job – as happened
many times in his life – his only concern was whether or not
there was any ‘excitement’ in it.
He spent these formative years in the Gorbals of blackened
tenements, outside toilets, rat-infested back courts, mass un-
employment and poverty. There is a current trend for Gorbals
20
first steps along the crooked path
folk who have escaped from the miseries of what was a bona
fide ghetto to look back on life there through rose-tinted spec-
tacles. The friendly ‘we were all in it together’ nostalgia of life up
a close, often portrayed in an autobiographical genre, is not a
picture I recognise as a reality. Certainly not for the majority.
One homely touch in these far-off days in the Gorbals would
be the barrels of salt herring, much desired by the district’s
thousands of immigrants: Jews, Lithuanians, Poles and the Irish.
They were placed outside the front door on the pavement of
almost every provision shop in the sombre gas-lit streets.
(Incidentally, a few of these barrels of salt herring could still
be seen outside Gorbals shops as late as the 1950s). But mostly
life there in the old days was lived in a dark, rancid mixture of
unsanitary housing, poverty and crime. So it is perhaps little
surprise that Johnny swiftly became a law-breaker.
Sixty or so years later, one academic social commentator
remarked, in an erudite analysis of the Gorbals slums, that what
was remarkable was not the number of youngsters who took to
crime, but the number who didn’t. This thought was mirrored
many years later when a Barlinnie governor got to read Johnny’s
own story of his life of crime and war heroics, which he wrote
while inside, scrawling his memoirs in more than thirty note-
books. The governor described any potential book made up
of Johnny’s diaries as interesting, indeed, exciting. And he
remarked: ‘His description of his early days in Glasgow shows
how it is almost inevitable that a youngster in his circumstances,
and with his penchant for gambling, should drift into crime.’
Maybe. But as noted previously some did escape the ghetto.
And the governor’s observation was a kindly one. It seems
that the young Ramensky had made his first contacts with the
police even before he was a teenager. His drift into crime has
some hallmarks similar to the life stories of other infamous
Glasgow criminals. The odd brick through a shop window, even
when still in short pants, and sweeties snatched from cafe
counters led to the cops feeling his collar for the first time
21
gentle johnny ramensky
and the first of hundreds of appearances before the beaks. It was
an introduction to a life of crime experienced by many a young
Glasgow lad – especially those without a fatherly hand to guide
them.
From the start, it seems, Johnny was not destined to be one of
the youngsters who triumphed over the appalling conditions of
their upbringing and went on to lead a socially useful life. His
war service apart, that was not a description that fitted his
destiny. He left school at fourteen to follow his father into
mining, though it is clear that from an early age he was enjoying
the excitements of cat burglary and safe breaking rather than the
boring, muscle-punishing grind of hewing coal underground.
The danger in shot-firing to bring tons of black gold crashing
down from the seams – in front of which men crawled, spade in
hand – did at least bring a touch of excitement. But such
underground thrills were insignificant compared with those
provided by a life of crime, even if creeping across tenement
roofs in the dark usually led to long periods swinging sixteen-
pound hammers to break stones in prison quarries, and years
of boredom behind bars, existing on the meagre prison rations of
the early twentieth century.
As with many of his contemporaries, Johnny’s drift into petty
crime led to him tasting life in a borstal. He was sent to the
famous penal establishment for young tearaways in Polmont in
1921. Borstal, called after a village near Chatham in Kent, was
the name given to a system intended to rehabilitate offenders
aged between sixteen and twenty-one. It dated back to 1902. It
may or may not have worked for tearaway Londoners sent
packing to cool off in the green rolling fields of Kent. But in the
industrial city of Glasgow, to be known as an ex-borstal boy was
almost a badge of honour on the streets. Central to the borstal
ethos was the idea that it was better to deal with unruly teen-
agers in a special institution rather than bang them up with
hardened cons in an adult jail, where they would pick up lessons
on the criminal life from the old lags. In theory, the separation
22
first steps along the crooked path
was a good idea and life in borstal was no easy touch. It was a
hard regime that included solitary confinement as a punish-
ment, in an infamous underground cell known as ‘the digger’.
The Polmont institution, in particular, had something of a
reputation for brutality against inmates. Sometimes the boys
were left by warders to sort out disputes with their fists in
irregular boxing matches. The inmates may have been tear-
aways without much experience of criminal life and not really
able to tutor each other in criminal ways, but the institution had
one huge disadvantage in the business of redemption – the
prestige its ‘old boys’ gained from surviving it and being
released to thieve and fight again!
In some ways, borstal helped the young Ramensky in his
chosen career, and as crime was his choice, he frequently turned
down well-meaning offers of help to go straight. To the very
end, this man would eloquently explain that his way of life
brought him no regrets. He would do the same again given a
choice.
The borstal regime suited Johnny. A small man at five foot six,
he used his time in the gym to hone his inherent gymnastic
skills. He also developed the astonishing upper-body strength
that he used to great effect in clambering over rooftops in search
of safes to break. His almost circus acrobatic skills were also to
help in future escapes from jail.
He was released from borstal in 1924, but it was not long
before he was in a real adult jail.
23